Walkerswood Hot Jamaican Scotch Bonnet Pepper Sauce

Every once in awhile I'm guilty of an impulse buy and more often than not, the product is a spicy one.  This time I was in the supermarket and I passed a shelf of hotsauce.  There were a few sauces I hadn't yet tried so I grabbed a bottle of Walkerswood Hot Jamaican Scotch Bonnet Pepper Sauce.  It's a relatively inexpensive bottle of hot sauce so I figured I'd give it a spin.

This sauce contains Scotch Bonnet Peppers, vinegar, scallions, onions and thyme to give it's flavor.  The scotch bonnet peppers make this sauce quite spicy for a hot sauce that you'd find in a supermarket.  Even so it was barely hot enough to make my nose run.  Keep in mind that heat isn't the "be all, end all" for a hot sauce.  Sometimes a sauce with this heat level is totally appropriate.  The heat of a hot sauce doesn't make it "good."

While the heat of a hot sauce can vary greatly the things that can really make or break a hot sauce are it's flavor, quality and consistency.  While this sauce was moderate in heat it didn't have much complexity in terms of it's flavor.  The only ingredients I could really taste were the peppers, the vinegar, the acidity of citric acid, the salt and a barely noticeable hint of garlic powder which crept up at the finish.  The thyme, scallions and onion were completely lost in my opinion.  The acidity in this sauce seems very balanced.

I was a bit disappointed with the quality of the ingredients and the sauce as a whole.  I certainly didn't like that the first ingredient is water and that the sauce is thickened with cornstarch.  The cornstarch provides a consistency somewhere between a thick hot sauce and runny jelly.  I was disappointed with the use of garlic powder rather than fresh garlic since there is a huge difference in flavor between the two.  My last disappointment was the use of potassium sorbate which is a preservative.

Bottom line:
Walkerswood Hot Jamaican Scotch Bonnet Pepper Sauce is certainly not a gourmet sauce but it's not bad when you consider the price.  The flavor is good but as I said before, some of the ingredients got lost.  If the consistency were improved and the thyme stood out more then it would be a fantastic sauce.